Earlier this month, OpenAI launched OpenAI Frontier, a new platform for enterprises to build and manage agents, but OpenAI Chief Operating Officer Brad Lightcap said enterprises have yet to experience large-scale AI adoption.
“One of the interesting things, and one of the inspirations for the work we’ve been doing lately on OpenAI Frontier, is that we haven’t really seen enterprise AI permeate enterprise business processes yet,” the AI executive said on the sidelines of the India AI Impact Summit last week in New Delhi.
“There are very powerful AI systems that anyone can use in their own capacity. And enterprises are very complex organizations with many people, many teams, many contexts that everyone has to work with. There are very complex goals that need to be achieved using many different systems and tools.”
There has been a lot of talk about AI agents taking over business processes and claims that “SaaS is dead.” These predictions could have moved SaaS stocks, but they haven’t come true. In fact, Lightcap said OpenAI became a large Slack user last year, illustrating how dependent AI companies still are on traditional enterprise software.
OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar posted in January that the company’s revenue is on the rise, with annual revenue topping $20 billion by 2025. Lightcap said demand is strong, although he declined to provide numbers.
“Most of the time we find ourselves having to meet too much demand. We’re still a growing organization, so there’s a global demand driver that we’d love to meet, and we’re doing our best to meet that,” Lightcap said.
At the same time, OpenAI is also thinking about how to quantify success for companies. Lightcap said OpenAI seeks to measure Frontier’s impact based on “business outcomes rather than seat licenses.” (The company has not yet announced Frontier pricing.)
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“Frontiers is a way to iterate and experiment with how to actually bring AI into really messy and complex areas of business. If we get it right, I think we’re going to learn a lot about both business and AI systems,” Lightcap said.
Days after the TechCrunch conversation, OpenAI partnered with consultancies including Boston Consulting Group (BCG), McKinsey, Accenture, and Capgemini to roll out its technology for enterprises. Even rival Anthropic released a finance, engineering, and design plugin for enterprises to build agents based on Claude.
Meanwhile, the company doesn’t have a clear path to integrating its recently acquired open source tool OpenClaw, but Lightcap said it “gives us a glimpse into the future” where OpenAI will allow agents to do “almost everything you want to be able to do on a computer.”
In conjunction with the India AI Summit, OpenAI has recently made a number of announcements regarding its business in the world’s largest market. India is ChatGPT’s second-largest user base outside the United States, with more than 100 million weekly users, the company said. Lightcap said voice as a modality is on the rise in India, allowing OpenAI to reach more people.
“Voice is very important here, and we feel like the voice model is now good enough and good enough to run in low-latency and low-bandwidth environments, where we’re going to be able to make technology accessible to groups of people who have perhaps been disenfranchised,” Lightcap said.
The company also signed an enterprise agreement for the use of tools and computing deployments. Lightcap pointed out that India ranks fourth in terms of number of companies in Asia, which is low for a country with a large population, and that OpenAI has a lot of room to expand in India.
The AI company also plans to open two new offices in India, in Mumbai and Bengaluru. However, these could be sales or market development offices. When I asked Lightcap if these offices would include technical talent, he said, “Never say never.”
As AI tools automate some tasks, there are also concerns about the impact on employment, especially in countries such as India where the IT services and BPO (business process outsourcing) industries are prominent. Shares of Indian IT companies have fallen in recent weeks as markets factor in the fact that fewer talent may be needed in areas such as coding. Lightcap said the company is “grounded” in what it observes from a job market perspective.
“Our view is that work will change over time. We don’t yet know where, how, and what will change, but we think it’s inevitable that work in the future will look different than it does today. And that’s natural. It’s part of the global, dynamic economy that we live in, so I think what we have to do is obviously become empathetic to where work is changing rapidly.
